US airports endured a chaotic day on Friday, the worst since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. A failure in the computer system that manages communications forced the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to halt all domestic flight operations at airports across the country for nearly five hours. Authorities justified the shutdown by citing “extraordinary circumstances and for safety reasons.” The incident brought airports nationwide to a standstill. By the end of the day, more than 6,500 flights had been canceled and nearly 10,000 delayed, leaving hundreds of thousands of passengers affected by the computer system failure.

Problems with the computer network began at around 3:36 p.m. Eastern time, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said hours later. Operators detected “instability” in radar communications at air traffic control centers. The problem emerged “while partial adjustments were being made to the system, incorporating new equipment and technology. However, these components were not adequate. They ended up overloading the old system,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said at a White House press conference alongside Duffy.

The FAA wasted little time in ordering a nationwide halt to air traffic. More than 3,500 planes were in the air at the time, and the authorities’ priority was to ensure they could land safely.

Mullin ruled out sabotage, cyberattacks or deliberate acts of wrongdoing as the cause of the incident. “There are no indications of suspicious activity. We have found no traces or identified anyone who accessed the system. It appears to have been an automated process,” the Homeland Security secretary said. “However, we are still investigating, so we are not ruling anything out,” he added.

Officials said no flights were ever in danger during the incident and that the shutdown was a precautionary measure. Nearly four and a half hours later, they authorized operations to resume. By then, it was 8:15 p.m. The US aviation system was already in disarray, and it could take days for normal operations to be restored. “It will be a slow process,” said the FAA’s top official. “I think we will be back up and running by the time we reach the peak of Thanksgiving travel,” Duffy said. For now, more than 1,500 flights have already been canceled for Saturday.

A nationwide order grounding all domestic flights is highly unusual in the United States. There have been only two comparable precedents this century: in January 2023, when an outage affected the system that alerts pilots to potential safety hazards; and, most notably, on September 11, 2001, after two planes struck the World Trade Center towers in New York and a third crashed near the Pentagon. On that occasion, authorities closed US airspace for two full days.

Friday’s order brought almost all domestic departures to a halt. Some international flights were allowed to take off, along with aircraft carrying medical supplies and other essential goods. Tens of thousands of passengers were stranded at airports across the country. The exact number of people affected is unknown, but more than two million people pass through security checkpoints at US airports every day, according to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Most travelers remained patient, and there were no major incidents. Some passengers who had already boarded their planes were ordered to disembark and return home.

The Trump administration blamed the disruption on outdated technology. “Patching doesn’t work. We need a comprehensive system; we need someone to build the entire system. Trying to put it together through partial fixes doesn’t work, and this is exactly what happens when you do it that way,” Mullin said. “A complete overhaul of the system is necessary,” he insisted.

“It is going to keep failing,” the transportation secretary warned, referring to the decades-old technology that the FAA wants to modernize and whose shortcomings ultimately contributed to the communications failure behind Friday’s disruption. “What we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system,” Duffy said, before using the opportunity to urge Congress to provide new funding for a complete overhaul. “Over the past year, the president has been asking Congress to fully fund the construction of an entirely new air traffic control system.”

Both members of Donald Trump’s Cabinet called for $50 billion in emergency funding to modernize the air traffic control system. The transportation secretary had previously requested an additional $30 billion. “I have asked for $30 billion, and the president has asked for $30 billion. But I want $50 billion,” Duffy said. “What could be more important than having an air traffic control system that actually works?” he added, arguing that the hardware, software and telecommunications infrastructure all need to be replaced.

The officials painted a troubling picture for air travelers: an outdated system in urgent need of modernization, with no guarantees that Friday’s incident will not happen again. This is despite the fact that the Trump administration has already been in office for nearly two years and that Trump previously served a full four-year term.

The Transportation Department unveiled a plan last year to build a new air traffic control system, which is expected to be operational within the next two years. The project is estimated to cost around $31.5 billion, although the Trump administration had already set aside just over $12 billion in funding through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed last year.

Some analysts interpreted Duffy’s remarks as suggesting that the problem stemmed from his efforts to modernize the air traffic control infrastructure. “By doing nothing, you introduce much greater risk into the system,” he said, adding: “I did not anticipate that we would experience an outage like this.”

Branko Milanovic dislikes university campuses that are located in idyllic settings, especially those far removed from any urban area. He believes that students — at least those studying social sciences, like economics — should be in the heart of cities, “taking the subway every day, watching how people cross the street, getting cheated out of five dollars… that’s the real world.”

Milanovic, 73, belongs to that breed of economists obsessed with keeping academia connected to real life. He’s one of the leading international figures in the study of inequality. For 20 years, he worked as a senior economist at the World Bank.

Currently, the Serbian-American researcher teaches at the City University of New York (CUNY). He has his office amidst the bustle of Fifth Avenue, in the heart of Manhattan, a place that could easily provide enough material for several PhDs in macroeconomics.

After delivering a lecture on November 6 at the Rafael del Pino Foundation in Madrid, Spain, several young people approached him to ask for a photograph. Milanovic is also one of those economists with rock star status in academic circles. In his interview with EL PAÍS, he addressed current events in the United States, but also the latest global economic transformations. And he used a term that he coined to describe the new ruling elites: “homoploutia.”

What does it mean? “Through my empirical work on income distribution in the United States,” he replies, “I realized that, both [in the U.S.] and in other countries, there’s a growing percentage of people at the top who are simultaneously in the highest decile of both capital income and labor income. Now, you could say, ‘well, this is a really good development, because it breaks that contradiction which always existed between so-called earned and unearned income.’ But, on the other hand, you start thinking, ‘well, maybe these guys are now forming an elite.’ They’re hard working, they’re very well educated, they have high labor income and they also have very high capital income. And it’s very hard, maybe, to get into that elite.”

The concept, which he develops in his latest book, The Great Global Transformation: National Market Liberalism in a Multipolar World (2025), is different from the aristocracy in the United States formed by the new tech billionaires, who’ve amassed considerable political power under Donald Trump.

“First, they’ve become very influential in the media: Jeff Bezos acquired The Washington Post, Elon Musk controls Twitter, Bloomberg obviously controls Bloomberg… I think it’s quite problematic. But we just saw how Musk spent a lot of money in the U.S. midterm elections [to help the Republicans] and failed. So, money doesn’t guarantee that you win,” he points out.

The interview with EL PAÍS took place just three days after the U.S. midterms, a veritable Democratic tsunami. This was a major setback for Trump, not only because a Democratic majority in Congress limits his power, but also because of the political message it sends both within and beyond the most powerful country in the world. However, Milanovic notes, “I don’t think it will have much impact on geopolitics. I think the policies with respect to China, the Middle East and Europe will continue, but things might be different for Europe psychologically, because now Europeans will say ‘well, America isn’t so crazy,’” he notes.

In fact, in his opinion, the next U.S. president, regardless of their political affiliation, “isn’t going to change policies regarding China; Joe Biden, who came after Trump’s first term, didn’t modify them.”

“Trump defined the moment by abandoning neoliberal globalization and going after China… but the same thing would have happened if Hillary Clinton had won the [2016] election, even though he did it in a more extreme way,” the economist adds.

In his latest work, he precisely addresses this decline of traditional globalization and the advent of a new order, which he defines as national market liberalism.

“The rules of neoliberalism — domestic and foreign — are the same, whether we’re talking about trade, movement of capital, movement of labor, technology… neoliberals would have liked a world without borders. My argument is that now, domestically, we continue with those neoliberal ideas, but externally, a different, mercantilist policy has been introduced… and this combination hadn’t occurred until now,” he states.

Milanovic believes that the crisis of globalization stems from a “paradox.”

“The success of neoliberalism,” he explains, “was the reduction of global inequality [and] the inequality between countries, but that same success has led to global conflict: it made China much more powerful, which became a threat to American hegemony. And also, Asian people in general have become richer and they’ve taken the positions of the European lower and middle classes. So, there’ve been two effects: conflict between nations and the impoverishment of the middle classes in the developed world.”

“The paradox is very important,” he adds. “Positive developments can also have negative consequences.”

And what role can Europe play in this multipolar context? “Well, I can give you my opinion, which may be wrong… but I think the problem with the European Union — not necessarily with individual countries — is that it hasn’t moved beyond the mindset of the 1990s. Now,” he acknowledges, “it’s totally understandable, because for Europe, the 1990s were really the best time. But that world no longer exists. And I think Europe’s problem is ideological: it must [learn to operate] in a world [defined by] multipolar competition.”

When asked about the model of social democracy that defines a large part of European society, Milanovic responds: “Keep it. But don’t tell everybody that they’re inferior to you because they don’t have it. You know, China isn’t going to have the same model. India is not going to have the same model. Brazil is not going to have the same model. And those are big countries.”

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Ten days have passed since Democrats delivered one of the most consequential midterm victories in modern U.S. history. The scale of the Republican defeat has drawn comparisons to the post-Watergate elections of the 1970s. But for Democrats, the harder task begins now: converting an electoral backlash against Donald Trump into a durable political project. They achieved their main objective, but the hard part starts now.

Their most important challenge will be convincing voters who turned their backs on the party of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris that a new generation of leaders has answers to the problems they face in their daily lives. Looking ahead to the 2028 presidential election, Democrats will have to organize internally, decide what policies to offer and, above all, determine which wing of the party will take the lead: establishment centrists, such as Hakeem Jeffries, the likely next Speaker of the House, or progressives led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Two things seem certain. First, the top priority is bringing soaring prices under control. The high cost of gasoline, housing, food, healthcare and virtually every other necessity of daily life helps explain election results that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis described as “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans.”

The challenge, however, is that Donald Trump will remain in the White House for another two years and has threatened to veto any major legislation emerging from Congress. It is also unclear who would reap the political benefits of any improvement in Americans’ quality of life ahead of 2028: the president’s party, or the Democrats, who emerged from the midterms with control of both chambers.

“The American people don’t want us to get even. They want us to get things done on their behalf. We ran on affordability. We won on affordability. And now it’s our job to govern on affordability,” Jeffries said Thursday on Morning Joe. That view is widely shared within the party.

Little interest in impeachment

A second lesson from the midterm election is that Democrats have little interest in pursuing impeachment proceedings against Trump. Such an effort would consume enormous political energy and, as previous attempts demonstrated, is unlikely to produce the desired outcome. Rather than removing the president from office, it could once again provide him with a powerful platform.

Democrats are equally reluctant to refight the culture-war battles over transgender rights and other identity issues that conservatives have so effectively weaponized in recent years. Perhaps no one has captured the party’s mood more clearly than Gina Hinojosa, the governor-elect of Texas: “The left-right paradigm just does not meet the moment of our time,” she said. “This is about 99.9% of us in the same boat against 15 billionaire tech guys who are frankly controlling government. And that’s what the people voted against in this election […] And we didn’t just have Democrat supporters, we had independent supporters and Republican supporters.”

Dave Hopkins, a political science professor at Boston College, sees a similar dynamic at work. In a video call, he argues that over the past decade Democrats have paid a steep political price for culture-war battles, which have undermined the party’s appeal among working-class voters, including members of minority groups such as Black and Latino Americans. “There is a consensus among the party’s factions that they now have to focus on the economy and equal opportunity,” said Hopkins, whose latest book, Polarized by Degrees, examines how the educational gap and the culture war have transformed U.S. politics. “The problem is that the recipe for achieving that improvement varies greatly depending on which leaders propose it.”

Two competing visions

The internal battle has not yet begun, but few doubt that it will eventually emerge. As Democrats move to advance legislation, the question will be which vision of the party prevails.

Centrists have taken comfort from the scale of the party’s victory in the House of Representatives. With only a handful of races still to be called, Democrats already hold 255 seats, with female lawmakers in the party surpassing 100 for the first time.

That gives the Democrats a sizable cushion above the 218 seats required for a majority, making it difficult for the party’s left flank to use the threat of defections as leverage in internal negotiations. As a result, the scenes of dysfunction that frequently marked the past two years, when Republicans controlled the House by just four seats, are unlikely to be repeated.

The breadth of the Democratic Party’s success in these midterms across virtually every corner of the country, with the notable exception of Florida, which now stands as the Republican Party’s last major stronghold, undercuts an argument that progressives had already begun to make. Ocasio-Cortez, who threw herself into campaigns such as that of Abdul El-Sayed, viewed his race as a test of the left’s electoral strength. If a candidate like him could win in a swing state such as Michigan, then perhaps she, too, could begin to contemplate a presidential run.

The problem for progressives is that El-Sayed won, but so did a host of centrists across the South and the Midwest. And the Democrats who delivered the most commanding victories, including Jon Ossoff in Georgia and James Talarico in Texas, are not identified with the party’s left wing.

It is also striking how Democratic leaders have adopted a message tightly focused on Americans’ everyday concerns, insisting that their priority lies at home rather than abroad.

El-Sayed, the incoming senator who has emerged as one of the rising stars of the left, has justified his opposition to aid for Israel by arguing that a country grappling with its own social problems cannot prioritize helping others abroad. “I don’t believe it’s my responsibility to buy defensive weapons for a foreign government when our kids are defenseless against schools that have been underfunded for a very, very long time,” he said before the election.

Mark Brewer, a professor at the University of Maine, agrees that the party is shifting toward domestic priorities: “Democrats have taken note of the lessons of Trump, who became very popular with his promise of America First. The problem is he said he would keep the country out of unnecessary foreign conflicts, but he ended up starting a war [against Iran] of his own accord. Also, Israel is increasingly less popular. All this will affect Democrats’ future decisions.”

And finally, who is waiting in the wings with an eye on the 2028 presidential race? At this stage, predictions are futile. A wide field of contenders is likely to take shape over the coming months, ranging from former vice president Kamala Harris, who is making less and less effort to conceal her interest in another run, to Ocasio-Cortez, as well as senators such as Jon Ossoff and Mark Kelly and governors including Josh Shapiro. The contest is wide open, and it will remain so until January 2028, when the Democratic primaries begin. This time, in South Carolina.

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